


Just Another Day

by sifuhotman



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 19:26:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11538882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sifuhotman/pseuds/sifuhotman
Summary: A collection of canon compliant one shots from The 100. Will be a variety of what I would consider "deleted scenes," and although there will be a lot of Blarke scenes, it will most definitely be about our delinquents.Title derived from Murphy's comment in the season 3 finale.





	Just Another Day

**Author's Note:**

> The walk back from Mount Weather is long. Bellamy talks about his experience in Mount Weather, Clarke can't help thinking she's a bad guy, and she makes an important decision.

_SETTING:_   _Post Season 2, Episode 16 - The survivors of Mt. Weather are walking home to Arkadia._

 

It's an eight hour walk back to Arkadia.

At first, Clarke doesn't even realize how long it is. She finds herself emotionally void, fingers mindlessly wrapped around her mother's chapped fingers. Abby Griffin lies in a stretcher, carried by two guardsmen, and although she's asleep and pale with dark circles under her eyes and beads of sweat dotting her forward, she's alive. Clarke squeezes her mom's hand a little harder, trying not to think about the lengths she went to so that Abby would stay that way.

Clarke finds that it's easier to focus on her feet, to see the worn out toes of her boots stepping over rocks and dirt. She makes a game for herself, trying to find the flattest area of earth where her feet can meet. When the inner voices of her morality taunt her for massacring a mountain, she presses her feet into the ground a little harder, as if hoping to leave a bruise.

Up ahead, she can see her friends walking alongside each other. Raven, being carried by Wick, occasionally whispering in his ear and resting her head on the crook of his shoulder. Monroe and Monty and Harper huddled in the knit sweaters from Mount Weather, squinting up at the sky. Octavia and Lincoln with their fingers intertwined, their gait and power demanding a good meter of space around them. 

100 of them had fallen from the sky. 46 walked out of Mount Weather.

_And how many in Mount Weather had to die for that?_

"Hey. You doing alright?"

The sound of Bellamy Blake speaking quietly pulled Clarke out of her thoughts, just enough concern that she didn't recoil. He fells into step beside her, dark brows scrunched low over his eyes. Clarke notices that he's shed some of the guards' gear he'd been wearing, including the stupid hat and the protective vest. An automatic assault rifle was slung across his chest, but it pointed to the ground, not up and ready to fire. "I've had better days," she replies.

"You can say that again." Bellamy doesn't look at Clarke, just gazes over at his people ahead. It's silent for a moment. "I always thought our walk back would be more..."

"Happy?"

He sighs. "I don't know. Isn't happy a bit of an unrealistic expectation nowadays?"

"Everyone's just tired," Clarke says. She watches her friend's face, realizing that what she said is more true for him than it may be for anyone else right now. Bellamy's cleaned up the dried blood on the corner of his mouth and the bruises along his forehead and eye have faded, but Clarke knows that he's a long way from being healed. They all are. "Are you okay?"

"Fine." He grips the strap of his gun. Keeps his eyes fixed their friends. "Fifty two," Bellamy says quietly. "Fifty two are dead."

"You think this could actually be lasting peace?" Clarke asks, and there's a note of desperation in her voice, almost hope, but even to herself, she sounds bleak.

"After what we did for the Grounders? I'd hope so. We defeated their biggest enemy. They ought to lay low for a little while." But even as he spoke, Clarke knew he didn't really believe it.

Because the all they knew was war. War and hatred and tribalism.

Beside her, Abby stirs. "Clarke?" she says, voice still frail, cracking from either dehydration or fatigue. Or both.

"I'm right here, Mom."

Abby blinks in the sunlight. She makes no move to sit up. "How far are we from Arkadia?"

"We’ll be there in a couple."

"Abby." The sound of feet jogging in the dirt catches Clarke's attention. "How're you feeling?"

"Probably the best I could be feeling," Abby says, subconsciously bringing her hand to her knee. 

Clarke sees Kane's lingering gaze, from Abby's injured knee to her chapped fingers to her face. She drops her mother's hand. "C'mon, Bellamy, I need to talk to you." She excuses herself from the two and Bellamy nods, understanding, and they fall back. Kane takes Clarke's place, speaking in gentle tones, and Clarke sees Abby reach out to take Kane's hand.

She wonders when that happened, when they got that close, close enough to hold hands and maintain fierce eye contact that can withstand anything. Clarke supposes that suffering has a way of bringing out intimacy in people. She's seen it among the delinquents—what's left of them—the quiet stillness of breath and reassurance that each one offers another. 

Bellamy's presence is right at Clarke's elbow. "Tell me about the mountain," Clarke finally says. She doesn't really want to know what Bellamy witnessed, she doesn't really want to know the consequences of saying  _it's worth the risk_. But Bellamy deserves to let her know, and if anything else in the world, Clarke could at least offer him that. "Before you got in contact with me on the radio."

The corners of Bellamy's mouth turn up into a wry smile. "You've already been in the mountain."

"That was different. I was too busy looking for a way to escape the whole time," she replies, which is partially true. Her mind was somewhere else entirely, with the boy who's now walking right beside her, and with Finn, who's dead. "All I really remember is the chocolate cake."

"Never got to try it," Bellamy says, almost wistfully.

Clarke waves the thought off. "It's overrated."

Bellamy glances at Clarke, then looks down at the ground. She's seen the look on his face—pensive and serious. After a minute, he says, "All I could think about was how Octavia would never forgive me for Lincoln becoming a reaper again."

The hairs at the nape of Clarke’s neck tingle. Her thoughts inevitably go back to the dropship, seeing him scream and fight violently against restraints, craving the drug that would kill him—not just his physical body, but his mind as well. “I’m sure that couldn’t be avoided.”

“It could’ve,” Bellamy says quietly. “I saw him. Got on his knees, bent his neck, and they stuck a needle with him with God knows what.” Bellamy’s voice cracks and he swallows. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him again.”

“But he’s okay now,” Clarke says gently. “He’s with us.” Bellamy doesn’t respond, so Clarke presses on. “What about afterwards?”

“After? Quarantine. They stripped us and cleaned us. Don’t know with what. Probably haven’t been that clean in forever, though.” Even though it’s not the time to be laughing, Clarke can’t help but offer a small smile. “The water was so hot, steaming everywhere…then it was so cold that it felt hot anyway. And the whole time it was the Mountain Men, in their stupid protective gear because they couldn’t handle the radiation. Somewhere in the middle of all that…” Bellamy’s voice trails off. When he speaks again, it’s a voice that hangs with ghosts and regret. “I made the decision to kill all of them.”

“I can’t believe you were locked up in those cages,” Clarke says without thinking, realizing that she had it easy in Mount Weather. She got to wake up in a soft bed with clean clothes and although she may have still been scared for her life, at least she didn’t wake up curled in a cage waiting to be drained for blood. “How did you Maya get you out of there, anyway?”

Bellamy’s jaw clenches, and Clarke isn’t sure if it’s a reaction to his memories or the very recent memory of Maya’s death. She supposes it’s a bit of both. “I don’t know,” he says, “how she knew. They drugged me and hung me up upside down to one of those machines and I was asleep the whole time until Maya woke me up.”

“She was smart,” Clarke whispers. “Of course she’d notice a treatment that stood out.”

“She got me down.”

“You weren’t caught?”

“No, we were…” Bellamy closes his eyes for a moment, brow furrowed. “I took care of it though.”

And there’s Bellamy Blake again, taking on the burden of taking someone’s life, again, for his people. Because that’s who he is. Clarke can remember how he faltered taking Atom’s life in a mercy kill, and she wonders if killing got easy for him, if the thought of taking someone’s life is tolerable as long as people are being saved because of it.

And if it is, she wants to know the secret. She wishes it were easy.

 _Maybe there are no good guys_ , Abby Griffin had said. But maybe there are still bad guys, and what if they’re the bad guys?

 _No, we can’t be_ , Clarke tells herself, because her friends are alive—most of them—and they’re walking back home to Arkadia.

“You must have been so scared,” Clarke says.

“Yeah. I knew if I didn’t make it…” Bellamy glances her way and they make eye contact, the _I can’t lose you, too_ hanging between them surrounded by the tension of _It’s worth the risk_. He breaks the eye contact. “I had to do it. I had to.”

“And you did.”

“Barely.”

Another silence. Until Bellamy says, “His name was Lovejoy.”

“Whose?”

“The guard that came in when Maya got me out.”

“You knew his name?”

“Name badge,” he says. “I…I saw his son, Clarke. They’re…they were just kids.”

It’s one of those moments where Clarke’s heart breaks and she’s just left with the glass shreds that cut deep into her humanity.

“They never did anything wrong. I wish we could’ve saved them.”

“We were just kids, too,” Clarke whispers. And it’s true. Life on the Ark had been hard, and it had been cruel, but Clarke had still been able to be a child. Then she looks over at Bellamy and wonders when the last time he was able to be ‘just a kid.’

“The people who helped us—they didn’t have to. They really didn’t. They could’ve turned us in to Cage and walked freely on the ground. But they hid us in their homes because they believed in what was right. Maya’s dad—” Bellamy’s voice thickens with regret. “I don’t know if you met him, Clarke. All he wanted was to do what was right and take care of his daughter.” He squints up at the sky. “I went to go open the Grounder cages and they were all gone, and he was the only body left. One bullet, in the head. He died trying to help us. Maya broke down.

“I thought we were going to lose, right there. He wasn’t the first ally to die, but he was the first one I knew.”

Clarke clenches her fingers into tight fists, recalling that at the same moment Bellamy discovered empty cages, Clarke had to look onto the face of the Lexa who’d betrayed them all. She’d been standing alongside Emerson who had that cocky smirk on his face, who wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit, because her friends were drilled into and died for the thing that gave Emerson his life.

“I’ll never understand her,” Bellamy says. “I don’t know how somebody could do something like that.”

“Who?”

“The Commander,” Bellamy spits. “We could’ve won and we could’ve done it without killing everyone.” Bellamy kicks the ground at his feet. “I don’t care how great Kane thinks she is. All she cares about is her own people, at any cost, same as Cage.”

Likening Lexa to Cage leaves a bitter taste in Clarke’s mouth.

But was she really any better? Cage was willing to let her people die for his. And at the end of the day, Clarke was willing to let his people die for hers.

Cage let his father die. Clarke was willing to risk Bellamy’s death. How can he not hate her for sending him into Mount Weather and considering his life as disposable? Clarke looks at the freckled face of her co-leader and her friend and knows that his life is the least disposable of all of them. Without them, they never would’ve defeated Mount Weather. She feels a tightening in her throat and she wants to apologize, but she can’t, she’s choked up, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to apologize to him.

Because, Clarke knows, that would require admitting that the allegations are true—that she _does_ care about him more. She cares about him selflessly, because he keeps them alive, and selfishly, too, because he keeps her alive.

And it’s now that Clarke realizes that she could be the cause of his death, whether it’s a cold and calculated plan that rests on Bellamy’s shoulders, or it’s the traumatic aftermath of those cold and calculated plans succeeding. Clarke knows the nightmares of war that plague her dreams. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of night in cold sweat, feeling the ring of fire that consumed the Grounder army attacking the dropship. Sometimes, no matter how many times she wills it to go away, she can feel Finn standing behind her with blood dripping down her hand. Sometimes, the sound of rubble crumbling along dead bodies in TonDC is so deafening Clarke can’t even hear herself saying, _we had no choice_.

She knows that she’ll smell the stink of burning, rotting flesh of melting bodies tonight.

“You think they’ll be okay?” Bellamy says. Clarke follows his eyes. Her gaze falls on Jasper Jordan, who’s still sniffling, gun in both hands, and for a moment she’s worried that he’ll hurt himself.

“They’re strong,” Clarke replies. She looks over Bellamy’s concerned face. “Will you?”

He sighs, dark hair falling into his eyes as he shake his head. “I have to be.”

Clarke takes one look at Bellamy and decides: she’s going to leave.

She trusts Bellamy—trusts him as a co-leader, someone who can take care of her people and someone who can defend and protect them. She trusts him with her life and she trusts that he’ll follow through with any plan she comes up with. Clarke trusts him too much, more than his life can afford.

“I’m going to go check in with Octavia,” Bellamy says, “and Lincoln.”

Clarke nods and watches her friend jog up to his sister, feels a pang in her chest because she almost took that love away from him when she allowed TonDC to be bombed. She walks at the tail of the Sky People, each step harder than the next.

“You gonna make it?” Monty’s voice startles her. He’d fallen back beside her, and she didn’t even notice.

“Depends on how we’re defining ‘make it.’”

“I’m worried about Jasper,” Monty says. He wraps the opening of his cardigan tighter around him, as if he was cold, despite the sun shining down and warming the earth around them. “I tried to talk to him but he completely ignored me.”

“Give him time,” Clarke says. “He just needs to grieve.”

“Jasper’s my best friend.”

“I know.”

“I never wanted to hurt him.”

“I know.” It hits Clarke, really hits her, how young he is. So much blood on his hands. “Take care of him. He needs you more than ever.”

Perhaps Clarke isn’t as good at concealing emotions as she thought she was, because Monty says, “You’ll take care of yourself, too, right?”

Clarke meets his eyes. “I’ll do my best.”

“What about Abby?” Monty asks. “You can’t just leave her.”

“She’ll be fine,” Clarke says, more to herself than to Monty.

“What about us? You’ve always been our leader, Clarke. You can’t just—”

“I’ve always been _one_ of your leaders.” Clarke watches Bellamy as he stands by the gate, overlooking his people finally returning home. Monty looks up from under his bangs and sees Bellamy.

“What about Bellamy?”

“He has Octavia,” Clarke says in a quiet voice. “As long as he has Octavia, he’ll be alright.”

Monty, thank God, doesn’t press any further. Clarke stops walking, a couple hundred feet from Arkadia’s gates. “You’ll get through this, Monty.”

Monty gives one last somber nod before moving to hug Clarke. “May we meet again.”

Clarke nods, refusing to let the sting in her eyes give way to tears, and she watches as Monty turns to walk into Arkadia. Bellamy nods at him, then shifts his eyes to Clarke.

“I’m sorry, Bellamy,” Clarke says softly as she sees him walking toward her. “I’m so sorry.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic for The 100. I'm actually not too happy with it but I figure it's a good place to start. Let me know any other scenes you wish we could've seen--anything is fair game.


End file.
